Under normal circumstances, an election in Hungary — a landlocked Central European country of less than 10 million — would not be a major world event. But for the past 16 years, Hungary has not been a normal country.

After Prime Minister Viktor Orbán won a massive victory in Hungary’s 2010 election, he almost immediately began changing the country’s system of government to ensure he would never lose again. He has rigged the electoral rules to favor his Fidesz party, consolidated control over 80 percent to 90 percent of the country’s media, and packed the courts with yes-men. By the mid-2010s, Hungarian elections were so thoroughly tilted in his favor that it became extraordinarily difficult for the opposition to win.

But this time around, they might just hit the jackpot.

Orbán’s opponents have united around a new party, Tisza, led by a charismatic defector from his regime named Péter Magyar. His message, focused on the regime’s catastrophic economic record and extreme corruption, has resonated with many Hungarians; his deft use of social media and in-person campaigning has helped him escape a severe cash disadvantage and the government’s hammerlock on the media. 

Polls show Tisza leading Fidesz by a considerable margin; there is a very serious chance that Magyar will be Hungary’s next prime minister, though he will need a supermajority in parliament to undo some of the most damaging changes Orbán has made. 

The stakes are enormous: not just for Hungarians, but for the United States and even the world.

Under Orbán’s far-right rule, Hungary has been Trump’s most reliable ally in Europe. But for many in the broader MAGA movement, it is more than that: it is a blueprint for the American future, the rough equivalent of what Nordic countries represent to Bernie Sanders. 

Were Orbán to truly fall, their dreams might be shattered — which is why Vice President JD Vance visited Hungary this week to all-but-openly campaign for Orbán’s reelection. On Tuesday, he gave a speech at a Fidesz campaign rally, calling President Donald Trump on the phone from the stage to get his thoughts on Hungary. “Go to the polls in the weekend, stand with Viktor Orbán, because he stands for you,” Vance said in closing.

The Hungarian prime minister is also a close Russian ally, recently describing himself as a “mouse” helping the “lion” Putin. Hungary’s membership in the European Union and NATO has allowed Orbán to disrupt the West’s pro-Ukraine efforts from within, including by blocking aid. Were Orbán to be ousted, it would be a considerable boon to the Ukrainian war effort — and a significant blow to the Kremlin.

Hungary’s 2026 election, in short, is not just like any other vote. It is one of the most significant elections of the entire year, and perhaps even the decade. 

How Orbán could actually lose

Under Orbán, Hungary has become a paradigmatic example of a very modern kind of autocracy: one political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism.”

In such a system, voters are (mostly) free to cast ballots for the candidate of their choosing: Hungary isn’t like Russia under Putin. But Hungarian elections are decidedly unfair, in that the system is structured to give the incumbent government so many advantages that the opposition should be almost incapable of winning. It is a system based around plausible deniability: retaining just enough democratic features that Hungary can claim to still be a democracy, while doing its best to give the voters as little meaningful choice as possible.

The government’s advantage begins with the very structure of elections. Hungarian parliamentary elections operate under mixed electoral rules: A little over half of all parliamentarians are elected in US-style single district contests, while the remainder are determined by national proportional votes.

The single districts are gerrymandered beyond all recognition to overweight Fidesz’s rural base and steal seats from the opposition’s heavily urban constituency. Moreover, Orbán put in place rules that allow his party to transfer over excess votes from gerrymandered districts they win to the proportional contest — effectively allowing them to run up the score in an already-rigged game.

But even beyond the formal rules, the background conditions of elections are profoundly unfair. There are a million different ways this is true — ranging from the government’s hammerlock over media to an unfair campaign finance system to a two-tiered voting system for Hungarians abroad that favors government supporters over critics. There are widespread allegations of voter intimidation, like local officials threatening to cut off a poor constituent’s access to health care unless they vote for Fidesz.

Kim Lane Scheppele, an expert on Hungarian electoral law at Princeton University, estimates that the opposition would need to win by roughly 10 to 15 points in the national vote to overcome the structural advantages the government has given itself. 

And currently, Magyar and Tisza are 10 points ahead in Politico EU’s poll of polls.

This is a remarkable accomplishment: a testament to both Magyar’s skills as a politician and to the serial failures of the Fidesz government.

Magyar used to be a high-ranking member of Fidesz: His ex-wife was Orbán’s justice minister. In 2024, he resigned in protest of a child sexual abuse scandal and began attacking the regime as a corrupt “feudalistic” oligarchy. This is largely true: The Orbán system depends on abusing regulatory and fiscal powers to funnel money into a handful of friendly oligarchs, who depend on government largesse and favor to maintain their wealth.

This has made the prime minister and his friends very wealthy men, but also done real damage to Hungary’s economy: the country is currently one of the poorest in the European Union, if not the poorest. As the Fidesz-aligned rich get richer, the quality of public services degrades. Hungary is experiencing population decline thanks to its low birth rate and unusually high levels of outmigration.

These are things ordinary Hungarians can see and feel in their everyday lives. As a socially conservative former regime insider, Magyar is a credible messenger for former Fidesz supporters disenchanted by Orbán’s serial failures. He has criss-crossed the country, using in-person events to overcome the government’s financial advantage and control over information, and become a fixture in the handful of independent media outlets that remain.

This perfect storm is what it takes to give the opposition even a chance to overcome the structural advantages Fidesz has put in place to remain in power. Even then, there is a real chance Orbán tries to cheat: declaring the election null due to alleged fraud, à la Trump in 2020, or installing himself in the country’s presidency (and expanding its powers) rather than leaving.

Whether he could pull this off is a different question. And right now, observers are bullish on Tisza’s chances: betting markets put Magyar’s odds of becoming prime minister at 66 percent.

What Orbánism’s defeat would mean for the global authoritarian right 

If Magyar does win, restoring democracy will not be easy. Much of the architecture of Orbánism is enshrined in the Hungarian constitution, which requires a two-thirds vote in parliament to amend. A full Tisza victory, then, requires more than merely winning a rigged game — it requires doing so resoundingly.

But even if domestic reform proves hard, Sunday’s results will matter to millions beyond Hungary’s borders.

Under Orbán, Hungary has become more than just a symbol of the far-right’s rising political fortunes: It has become an active player in extending its global reach and an intellectual leader in shaping its agenda. Budapest has spent an enormous amount of money and political effort helping support sister parties across the democratic world. There is a reason why far-right leaders like France’s Marine Le Pen, Argentina’s Javier Milei, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu have all visited Budapest to campaign with Orbán during the late stages of the 2026 campaign.

The greatest success, however, has been the Hungarian capture of the American right’s imagination. Beginning around the late 2010s, Trump-aligned intellectuals and political operatives began citing Hungary as a model for what the right should aim to do in the United States. They describe it not as an impoverished authoritarian outpost, but a conservative Christian democracy that took the difficult-but-necessary steps to destroy the pathological influence of cultural leftism on a society. 

Adherents to this view can be found throughout the Trump administration, with Vance himself perhaps the most prominent. In a 2024 interview with Rod Dreher, an American conservative writer who decamped to Budapest to take a job at a government-backed think tank, the future vice president praised Orbán’s crackdown on academic freedom — which included forcing an entire university out of the country — as an example for the American right.

“The closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary,” Vance said. “I think his way has to be the model for us.”

Top conservative intellectuals share a similar view: Dreher is not the only one who moved to Hungary to work with a government-aligned outfit. Were Hungary’s regime to well and truly fall, it would represent a significant ideological defeat for this movement, one that would raise questions about its political durability in Europe, America, and elsewhere. 

A defeat for Orbán is a defeat for Putin

The contest in Hungary also has huge stakes for the still-brutal war in Ukraine.

Since the 2022 Russian invasion, Orbán has emerged as the country’s greatest opponent in the Western alliance. He has repeatedly blocked European and NATO support for Ukraine — he is currently holding up a roughly $100 million EU loan to the country — and has stoked conflict with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum recently reported that some European leaders no longer talk about the war in front of Orbán, as there is an expectation that anything said will get back to Putin.

This isn’t coming out of nowhere: there is longstanding suspicion of Ukraine in Hungary, owing largely to the treatment of the Hungarian ethnic minority in that country. Orbán’s central reelection argument has been that Magyar would be a pro-Ukraine puppet; he has repurposed against Zelenskyy the same conspiratorial attack lines, at times word-for-word, he once used against Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros (both men are Jewish).

Perhaps for this reason, the nationalistic Magyar has been cool toward Zelenskyy and Ukraine during the campaign — adopting a more adversarial stance than any other center-right party in Europe. But at the same time, he has no love for the Kremlin, which is currently busy trying to get Orbán reelected. So while Hungary under Magyar may not be a pro-Ukrainian nation, it will certainly be far more anti-Russian than it is under Orbán. 

A Magyar victory — even a simple majority — would at very least mean that Russia loses its mole in Europe. At most, it could lead to Ukraine receiving significantly greater amounts of European support. 

You can thus say this for Viktor Orbán: He has made Hungary into an outsize player on the global stage, though far more for ill than for good. His fall would have shockwaves in Brussels, Washington, and Moscow — weakening the financial foundations of the European far-right, the ideological foundations of the MAGA movement, and the political foundations of Putin’s effort to split Europe from Ukraine.

But if Orbán wins, none of this will come to pass. And the fate of Hungarian democracy could be sealed.

In the spring of 2015, few outlets predicted that the US would soon face a democratic crisis. Barack Obama was the president, and the conventional wisdom was that he’d be succeeded by Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. Donald Trump wouldn’t announce his presidential bid until June, and most people in Washington treated it as a big joke when he did.

But that March, Vox co-founder Matt Yglesias published an essay with a darkly prescient title: “American democracy is doomed.” 

Presidential systems, the late political scientist Juan Linz found, had a tendency to break down, the strict separation of powers breeding irresolvable conflict between the executive and legislative branches that tended to end in coups, or something like them.

The United States was long seen as an exception to Linz’s rule, but Yglesias believed this was coming to an end. Polarization made the normal congressional lawmaking process basically unworkable, leading to more power being wielded unilaterally from the White House. Eventually, a president was going to push that power to its breaking point — and cause a full-blown constitution collapse.

Given that we are now in the middle of a crisis in which a president wields his office’s powers to attack the democratic system itself enabled largely by the partisan fealty of his party, I thought that his analysis had earned a second look. 

His warnings of the dangers of rising executive power paired with polarization felt prophetic. The basic Linzian framework, which positioned the very existence of a presidency as the root problem, felt a little off (albeit in an interesting and revealing way).

So, I asked Yglesias, who now writes the excellent Slow Boring newsletter, to chat about his essay: what it got right, what it got wrong, and what it tells us about where the United States is headed. A transcript of our conversation follows, edited for length and clarity (and you can listen to an audio version on The Gray Area podcast soon!)

To start with a basic question: 11 years ago, at a moment when few people were worried about the long-term prospects of American democracy, you decided to play Cassandra. Why?

I was thinking not about Donald Trump, or the particulars of his personality, or the particular nature of right-wing populism, but about the structural properties of the American political system. We have this Madisonian system of checks and balances, separate but overlapping political powers, that has been found around the world to be very unstable and prone to break down. 

I was elaborating on the work of the late Yale political scientist Juan Linz, who had this observation that presidential-type systems had always broken down every place they were tried, except for the United States. He wrote an essay in the early 1990s asking: Why is America the exception to this rule?

His take was that American political parties were unusually low-discipline and unusually non-ideological —these sort of catch-all, geographically dispersed parties. Clearly, if you look at the time between 1994 and 2014, that stops being true. America moves to a much more tight, ideologically organized party system.

So, I was saying, in advance of Trump, in advance of this mainstreaming of concern about democracy, that the Obama-era crises — the standoffs over the debt ceiling, the multiple government shutdowns, Obama exerting executive authority over immigration in unusual ways — these were signs of the United States moving in a Latin American-type direction, where the president and Congress are ultimately going to butt heads, and both are going to appeal to the people, the military, the bureaucracy to say, “my way or the highway.”

One thing I really liked about the essay is the focus on how everybody had been complaining about executive power for a long time, but from alternating directions. There were accusations that George W. Bush was a fascist, then Obama-era conservative complaints about executive overreach on immigration. At the time, that all felt like partisan hyperbole, but in hindsight, your essay’s claim that “everyone was right” held up really well.

And yet the current crisis isn’t the Linzian standoff between Congress and president that you envisioned; it’s an executive doing whatever he wants while Congress defers, because it’s controlled by his party.

I agree. People ask me about this article all the time, and I’m not constantly bringing it up, because what I was talking about is pretty different from what’s going on now.

That being said, if the midterms play out the way most people think, Democrats will take the House but not the Senate. And then, all the questions that were asked of Democrats by their base earlier this year in different government funding bills — how can you do X, how can you do Y — the needle was threaded by the fact that Democrats were in the minority in the House. They just all vote no, and the bill passes anyway. 

When it’s Hakeem Jeffries, and you don’t have the curious math of the filibuster, there’s going to be a lot of pressure to say, “you can’t give the king his ship money if this is how he’s conducting himself.” And I don’t think Trump is going to sign a bill that says you’ve got to stop sending ICE into cities [or] you’ve got to stop being corrupt. 

My more mature self would admit to more uncertainty about everything, but I do think the basic structural question that piece raises can get a little underrated these days relative to things that are idiosyncratic to Trump, because he’s such a spectacular figure.

I’m skeptical of the focus on presidentialism as the root problem; I think it confuses the symptom with the disease. Parliamentary systems face institutional crises, too. Hungarian democracy was overtaken over by an authoritarian who won a two-thirds majority and rewrote the constitution. Israel is mired in a legitimacy crisis between the legislature and the Supreme Court.

The root problem in each case isn’t constitutional design; it’s that voters elevated an authoritarian party to power, which then worked to undermine the system from within.

Yes and no. 

Hungary is interesting, because what’s played out there is very much what the framers of our Constitution were trying to avoid: a charismatic demagogue that does really well in one election then wields democratically obtained power to undermine liberalism and competitive elections.

Israel I see as a pretty bullish case for good institutional design. Netanyahu has lost power multiple times in free and fair elections. Opposition parties have been able to collaborate in a big-tent way while maintaining their distinctiveness. The multiparty system elides that very nicely.

The Linzian critique is that it can break down over fairly non-existential controversies. You just have a disagreement between Barack Obama and Paul Ryan about the trajectory of the welfare state — boring stuff — and, yet, you couldn’t meet in the middle or pass a bill and resolve it at the next election. The country almost defaulted [in 2011]. 

On some level, it doesn’t matter, because the United States is not going to radically revise its basic constitutional system. 

But, I do think what’s relevant is remembering that there are structural issues in play, that the United States is working with a constitutional mechanism that is known to be failure prone. When we think about what kinds of tactics are deployed against Trump in the years to come, I think you want to be careful about creating self-fulfilling crisis dynamics.

The specter of January 6th happening, Trump making his political comeback, doing all those pardons and basically getting away with it, has put us in an incredibly dangerous situation that I feel is frequently discussed by people on the left but in certain respects not taken as seriously as it ought to be. We have to think about what it would mean, if things go well politically over the next two or three cycles, to move forward in a constructive way instead of ping-ponging.

Relatedly: I think if you want to defend democracy, you have to actually talk about democracy — you can’t just dance around the substantive questions. There are executive agencies at present that act as if they’re dedicated to undermining civil liberties protections essential to democracy, and stopping this kind of abuse requires confronting it directly.

In other countries, an open focus on democracy has proven to be a powerful coalition-building tool. When there’s a widely shared perception that democracy is on the line, it can unite previously fractious opposition groups — as it did in Poland, and as it may now in Hungary, where a center-right candidate has unified the opposition and could actually overcome an authoritarian electoral infrastructure.

What I think would be correct is to put democracy at the heart of what Democrats are doing, actually. The reason centering democracy was meaningful for the Polish opposition or potentially for Péter Magyar in Hungary is that it’s leading to actions — formation of coalitions and adoption of strategies — that would not make sense in the absence of those kinds of threats.

Magyar is saying to center-right voters, “Orbán is really bad, and just because you have broadly center-right values doesn’t mean you should default to voting for him.” And he’s saying to left-of-center Hungarians, “We disagree about a lot, but we should bandwagon together and address the abusive quality of this regime rather than having a super detailed argument about tax policy.”That’s democracy as a theme, not a talking point.

In part because the institutional structure is different, but in part because of choices that have been made, democracy has been invoked in anti-Trump politics in fairly superficial ways. There’s a world in which Biden has several prominent Republicans in his cabinet and says, “I’m going to be a one-term president. The mission of this presidency is to secure accountability for the perpetrators of January 6th, get the country out of COVID.” But at the end of the day, the Democratic Party base and the Democratic Party elite — the policy demanders — did not want that. 

Democrats are very much of two minds about Trump. They really, sincerely — and I think accurately — think that he is dangerous. But they do not really take the kinds of actions you have seen from opposition movements in Czechia, Israel, Hungary, [and] Poland, where you change up what you’re doing to shore up democratic institutions and defeat this kind of menace.

This is where I’m really sympathetic to the institutionalist argument. The two-party system makes it a lot harder. I just got back from Brazil, where I’d been doing field reporting on this. Brazil is a presidential system, but they also have a multiparty system. That made a huge difference when Jair Bolsonaro was president. He wanted to act a lot like Trump, but their Congress and Supreme Court were much more resistant.

I tried to resist this conclusion because it wasn’t my prior, but it turns out a major part of the answer is the multiparty system. Brazil has something like 20 parties currently registered in its Congress. That made it incredibly difficult for Bolsonaro to jam through legislation, because the Brazilian system works on pork-barrel trading. It also made it really hard for him to get pure partisan Supreme Court justices through.

There are institutional constraints from the two-party system that mess with the way the party makes decisions and make it a lot more difficult to adopt a popular-front, pro-democracy movement than what you’ve seen in other backsliding democracies.

I completely agree. 

If you look at what happened in the Biden years, it was as if none of this Trump stuff had ever happened. [It was] the most normal thing in the world: You come in with a new trifecta, it’s really narrow, but you brush off the fact that it’s narrow, take your coalition’s entire agenda, copy-paste it in, the most moderate members pare it down, some of it goes through, then there’s backlash, and you lose ground in the midterms. That’s just like every American presidency. It’s weird, in what I would say, and Joe Biden would say, are extraordinary times for American democracy, to just operate on autopilot. But that’s because the logic of these political institutions is very powerful.

In a multiparty Congress, you can’t do that. There’s always some centrally positioned party whose job is to say, “No, you can’t do your agenda, we’ve got to do some horse trading.”

I’m more persuaded after going to Brazil that a multiparty coalition presidential system could work in the United States. But the big problem remains: These reforms are fundamentally precluded by the incentives of the two existing parties. It seems like the only thing that could break the logjam would be a true constitutional crisis. Grimly, the worse things get, the greater the possibility for radical structural reform.

That was fundamentally the point of my piece: I did not think it was very likely that we would avert a crisis fully, but if we understood the institutional drivers, there was a better chance that, when a crisis arose, we would try to adapt in a useful way. We have a tradition in Latin American history of backsliding and resliding. What you want is what Brazil had: They came out of their last period of military rule with a different constitutional system that some people say is now more robust than the one they had before.

I was not envisioning an actual military dictatorship, so much as some kind of asterisk on the system in which a president aligned with the courts is just disregarding Congress for some period of time. Is that what’s going to be happening a year from now? I don’t know, but you could easily see it. Democrats win the midterms, but Trump still has the Senate. He keeps appointing MAGA judges. This administration so far, for all its many sins, has mostly followed the law as instantiated by federal judges. But what court orders are is a moving target. Bush judges, Trump-one judges are getting replaced by more MAGA judges. Bukele would tell you he follows all Supreme Court orders, because, once he purges the Supreme Court, there’s no problem following the orders.

Congress is the first article in the Constitution, but the president has command-and-control authority over all these people, people with guns. It’s always out there as a possibility that orders are given and orders are followed. And if there’s some legal stamp on it, why wouldn’t they be followed?

Notably, one of the first things Trump did was, in a legal but highly irregular way, change up the senior military command. There is no doubt the president is within his rights to relieve the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and replace him. That is an unquestioned legitimate presidential power. But it is so much more eyebrow-raising than issuing an executive order about some regulatory agency and the courts saying no.

This story was supported by a grant from Protect Democracy. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

Donald Trump’s State of the Union address was the longest ever given. But to understand its core purpose — arguably, the core purpose of his presidency — you need only to hear one line.

It came during a discussion of the SAVE Act, a Republican bill designed to combat the fictitious scourge of noncitizen voting. Democrats, Trump claimed, only opposed the bill because “they want to cheat.” And then he took it much further.

“Their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat,” Trump said on Tuesday night. “We’re going to stop it. We have to stop it.”

Think about that for a second. This is the president of the United States, speaking to the country in a ritualized national address, claiming that the opposition party is not only wrong on policy but fundamentally illegitimate, so much so that if they win an election it must be because they cheated.

Taken literally, that is the president announcing that the stated policy of his administration is preventing the opposition from winning any future election.

We’re all so used to wading through Trump’s sea of hyperbole that it’s easy to push past a bald-faced declaration of authoritarian intent. And to be clear, I don’t think the SAVE Act — or anything else Trump has proposed so far — could actually lock Democrats out of power. There is a real gap between what he is saying and what he is capable of doing.

Still, we have very good reason to think that Trump really does believe that Democrats cannot win without “cheating.” 

When he last lost an election, in 2020, he claimed — and has continued to falsely insist — that the contest was stolen. His supporters took this so seriously that, after a fiery Trump speech at the White House on January 6, they marched on the Capitol building and ransacked the very chamber in which he spoke tonight. 

He even referenced these grievances in the State of the Union, saying “this should be my third term, but strange things happen.”

Not rivals, but enemies

Trump’s vitriol is different from the “normal” partisanship of pre-Trump State of the Unions. Prior presidents might attack, or even mock, the other party’s policy ideas. But they would treat their opponents as political rivals: as people they disagreed with who were nevertheless partners in the shared project of democracy. 

In many ways, that’s the conceit of the entire State of the Union tradition: that the president, in speaking before Congress, is giving an accounting of his actions to the nation as a whole, divided in opinion but united in purpose.

But Trump doesn’t see Democrats as opponents. He sees them as enemies.

I mean “enemies” here in the specific sense used by interwar German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. In his view, the liberal idea of politics — a community of political equals engaged in a shared project of collective governance — was a fantasy. For Schmitt, politics always comes down to a division between friends (those in your group) and enemies (those outside it, who may be legitimately excluded from political life or even killed).

Schmitt’s thinking has enjoyed a revival among MAGA intellectuals, a reflection in part of the movement’s increasingly Manichean view of American politics. Democrats, in this telling, are not just wrong; they are evil, an internal scourge bent on the destruction of America as we know it.

And indeed, this was how Trump talked about Democrats in the State of the Union.

“These people are crazy. I’m telling you, they’re crazy. Boy, we’re lucky we have a country with people like this,” he said. “Democrats are destroying our country, but we’ve stopped it, just in the nick of time.”

At many times during the rambling speech, Trump sounded optimistic, even sunny. But make no mistake: It is this dark Schmittian vision that dwells at the heart of his politics.